18 . (( '. .' -....... .':':':' :.:.'.:." ......-. .-, .' .m... .\1 . - ci:J ...... i' . .....-..-...-.,. -- .. -- -- .. .. :::':cA CJì\ t:Jr\ -(Â/t,I .....::L/. - / "But I tell you, on that nig"ht 1 was at home plotting something entirely different." . ished the passage, unpuckered his lips, and disappeared within. T Itousand-Character W E now take up Thousand-Char- acter Chinese, a sill1plified lan- guage that has been suggested (by a Chinese, as it happens) as an alternative to Basic English. A Dr. Lin Mousheng, a local official of the Chinese News Serv- ice, first brought up this idea publicly during a radio-forum discussion of the merits of Basic English; it surprised ev- erybody, including, we' gathered, Dr. Lin himself. "I had been in favor of the idea for some time," he said when we called on him last week, "and it just sort of spurted out that night on the radio." Dr. Lin has lived here eleven years, and has studied at Oberlin, Yale, and the University of Chicago, so he's able to compare the two simplified languages in a reasonably unbiassed way. He told us, by way of background, that Thousand- Character Chinese is the invention of James Yen, a famous Chinese educator who is now in \Vashington, working for his government. Shortly after the first World War, Mr. Yen col1ected what . he thought were the thousand lTIOst important words in Chinese. There are seventy thousand words in the written language, which, by the way, is used all over China no matter what local dialect is spoken. Each word is represented by a separate ideograph, or character. Hence the name Thou- sand-Character Chinese. In the process of correction and revision, Mr . Yen's new language grew from a thousand to twelve hundred and fifty char- acters, but he couldn't bear to part with a catchy name like Thousand- Character Chinese, and we can't say we blame hill1. Now then, the advantages of Thou- sand-Character over Basic, as expound- ed by Dr. Lin, are these. There are only eight hundred and fifty words in Basic, but you have to learn at least a little English gramll1ar to use them. The twelve hundred and fifty words in Thousand-Character are mostly just nouns and verbs, and you use them pret- ty much as you like, the Chinese lan- guage having no persons, numbers, genders, conjugations, declensions, or other gadgetry. Instead of saying "T 0- ll10rrow I shall go," a Chinese just says API\IL 2, 9, I 94-4- " G " d h o tOll10rrow, an aSSUll1es t at the listener will use the brains God ga ve hill1 to figure out who's going and that the tense is taken care of by "toll1orrow." In Chinese, all forms of h b ee b " . t ever to e -all1, art, IS, are, was, wast, were, shall, wilt, be, will be, have been, and the rest-are taken care of by the one character shih. You say "Yes- trday I be cold" and "T Oll10rrOV{ I be cold." Be easy, no? As for plurals, Dr. Lin points out that if .Lt\mericans " 0 h h " h ' say, ne seep, two seep, t ere s no earthly reason they shouldn't say, "One child, two child," as the Chinese do. Another nice thing about Chinese is that almost all the nouns are also used as verbs, and vice versa-"sweep" and "brooll1/' for instance, would be the sall1e word. In China, there's no distinc- tion between adverbs and a.djectives, and there consequently is no horror there at an expression like "Drive slow." Matter of fact, in Dr. Lin's opinion, we All1er- icans approach the spirit of his language when we're at our tersest, in telegrams, signs, and headlines. As for the ideo- graphs you'd have to learn to master Thousand-Character, he says that's not too tough, because they're really noth- ing but highly stylized little pictures, some of which could be figured out by a person who didn't k.pow the language 11 " T " f I . at a. ree, or examp e, IS repre- sented by an ideograph that might be said to look like a tree, and to say "for- est" you write "tree" two or three times Ín succession. "Not much of a forest, but a forest, anyway," Dr. Lin rell1arked ll10destly. Dr. Lin pointed out to us that Churchill's "blood, sweat, and tears" can be literally translated into Thou- sand-Character, but the nearest Basic can COll1e is "blood, face water, and " " Th ' B . f " eye water. at s aSlC or you, he added, with an Oriental chuckle. A Thousand-Character conversation could include the vital phrase "1'll1 bored," whereas in Basic this would have to be "I'm tired," which isn't the sall1e thing at all. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity" is almost the same in the Thousand-Character version, but if you try it in Basic, you come up with "Foolishness, foolishness, everything is foolishness. " Reader Reaction T HIS is a conversation which we would have given much to over- hear in its entirety, but unfortunately we caught only the last half of a sen- tence, dropped by one of two ladies who